| Lower Yangtze Mandarin | |
|---|---|
| Jianghuai Mandarin, Huai Chinese | |
| Region | Between theHuai andYangtze Rivers, primarily in centralAnhui,Jiangsu, and easternHubei |
| Ethnicity | Jianghuai people Subei people |
| Speakers | 86.05 million (2012)[1] |
| Written vernacular Chinese | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| ISO 639-6 | juai |
| Glottolog | jing1262 |
| Linguasphere | 79-AAA-bi |
 | |
Lower Yangtze Mandarin (traditional Chinese:下江官話;simplified Chinese:下江官话;pinyin:Xiàjiāng Guānhuà) is one of the mostdivergent and least mutually-intelligible of theMandarin language varieties, as it neighbours theWu,Hui, andGan groups ofSinitic languages. It is also known asJiang–Huai Mandarin (traditional Chinese:江淮官話;simplified Chinese:江淮官话;pinyin:Jiānghuái Guānhuà), named after theYangtze (Jiang) andHuai Rivers. Lower Yangtze is distinguished from most other Mandarin varieties by the retention of a finalglottal stop in words that ended in astop consonant inMiddle Chinese.
During theMing dynasty and earlyQing dynasty, thelingua franca of administration was based on Lower Yangtze Mandarin. In the 19th century the base shifted to theBeijing dialect.
Lower Yangtze Mandarin is spoken in centralAnhui, easternHubei, most ofJiangsu north of the Yangtze, as well as the area aroundNanjing.[2] The number of speakers was estimated in 1987 at 67 million.[3]
TheLanguage Atlas of China divides Lower Yangtze Mandarin into three branches:[1][4]
There are also small islands ofJianghuai Mandarin (軍家話,Jūnjiāhuà) throughoutGuangdong,Guangxi,Hainan andFujian provinces, brought to these areas during theMing dynasty by soldiers from Jiangsu, Anhui and Henan during the reign ofHongwu Emperor.
TheHuizhou dialects, spoken in southernAnhui, share different features with Wu, Gan and Lower Yangtze Mandarin, making them difficult to classify. Earlier scholars had assigned to them one or other of those groups or to a top-level group of their own.[5][6] TheAtlas adopted the latter position, but it remains controversial.[7]
The relationship of the Lower Yangtze Mandarin varieties to othervarieties of Chinese has been an ongoing subject of debate. One quantitative study from the late 20th century by linguist Chin-Chuan Cheng focused on vocabulary lists, yielding the result that Eastern dialects of Jianghuai cluster with theXiang andGan varieties, whilstNorthern and Southern Mandarin, despite being supposedly "genetically" related, were not in the original 35-word list. In the 100-word list they did cluster, albeit with other varieties.[8]
Some Chinese linguists like Ting have claimed that Jianghuai is mostly Wu containing a superstratum of Mandarin;[9]for example, the frequency and usage of the postposition阿 as a postverbalaspect marker in theTaixing dialect of Jianghuai Mandarin can be seen as intermediate betweenStandard Mandarin, which tends to omit postverbal prepositions, andthe Wu varieties, which tend towards omission of preverbal prepositions.[10]
When vowels from Jianghuai Mandarin and Wu were compared to dialects from China's southeastern coast, it was concluded "thatchain-type shifts in Chinese follow the same general rules as have been revealed by Labov for American and British English dialects."[11]
Dialogue from literature published inYangzhou, such as the 18th-century novel Qingfengzha (simplified Chinese:清风闸;traditional Chinese:清風閘;pinyin:Qīng Fēng Zhá), contains evidence of a Jianghuai dialect being an expression of identity clearly differentiated from that of others: locals spoke the dialect, as opposed to sojourners, who spokeHuizhou dialect or Wu dialects. Large numbers of merchants from Huizhou lived in Yangzhou and effectively were responsible for keeping the town economically afloat.[12]
ProfessorRichard VanNess Simmons has claimed that theHangzhou dialect, rather than beingWu as it was classified byYuen Ren Chao, is a Mandarin dialect closely related to Jianghuai Mandarin. Simmons claimed that, had Chao compared the Hangzhou dialect to the Common Wusyllabary that Chao developed, as well as to Jianghuai Mandarin, he would have found more similarities to Jianghuai than to Wu.[13]
A characteristic feature of Lower Yangtze Mandarin is the treatment ofMiddle Chinese syllable-final stops. Middle Chinese syllables with vocalic or nasal codas had a three-waytonal contrast. Syllables with stop codas (-p, -t and -k) had no phonemic tonal contrast, but were traditionally treated as comprising a fourth category, called theentering tone. In modern Mandarin varieties, the former three-way contrast has been reorganized as four tones that are generally consistent across the group, though the pitch values of the tones vary considerably.[14] In most varieties, including theBeijing dialect on whichStandard Chinese is based, the final stops have disappeared, and these syllables have been divided between the tones in different ways in different subgroups.[15] In Lower Yangtze Mandarin, however, the stop codas have merged as a glottal stop, but these syllables remain separate from the four tonal categories shared with other Mandarin varieties.[16] A similar development is also found in the adjacentWu dialect group, and in theJin group, which many linguists include within Mandarin.[17][18]
In Lower Yangtze varieties, the initial/n-/ has merged with/l-/. These initials have also merged inSouthwestern Mandarin, but as/n-/; most other Mandarin varieties distinguish these initials.[19] The Middle Chinese retroflex initials have merged withaffricate initials in non-Mandarin varieties, and also in Southwestern Mandarin and most Lower Yangtze varieties. However, theNanjing dialect retains the distinction, like northern Mandarin varieties.[20] Most Lower Yangtze varieties retain a/ʐ-/ initial, but in central Jiangsu (including Yangzhou) it has merged with/l-/.[20] TheTai–Ru varieties of eastern-central Jiangsu retain a distinct/ŋ-/ initial, but this has merged with the zero initial in other Mandarin varieties.[20]
It has been claimed that the Jianghuai varieties of Mandarin aroundNanjing are an exception to the normal occurrence of the three medials[i],[y] and[u] in Mandarin, along with eastern Shanxi and someSouthwestern Mandarin dialects.[21]
The existence ofliterary and colloquial readings is a notable feature of Lower Yangtze Mandarin.[22]
| Example | Colloquial reading | Literary reading | Meaning | Standard Mandarin pronunciation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 斜 | tɕia | tɕiɪ | oblique | ɕiɛ |
| 摘 | tiɪʔ | tsəʔ | pick | tʂai |
| 去 | kʰɪ | tɕʰy | go | tɕʰy |
| 锯 | ka | tɕy | cut | tɕy |
| 下 | xa | ɕia | down | ɕia |
| 横 | xoŋ | xən | across | xəŋ |
| 严 | æ̃ | iɪ̃ | strict | ian[jɛn] |
| 挂 | kʰuɛ | kua | hang | kua |
| 蹲 | sən | tən | crouch | tuən |
| 虹 | kaŋ | xoŋ | rainbow | xoŋ |
The original dialect ofNanjing in theEastern Jin dynasty was a form ofWu Chinese. After theWu Hu uprising, theJin Emperor and many northern Chinese fled south, bringing their variety of Chinese with them. The new capital of Eastern Jin was established atJiankang (Chinese:建康;pinyin:Jiànkāng), now Nanjing, thus shifting the local speech from a Wu variety to a variety of Mandarin. However, due to its role as capital and events such asHou Jing's rebellions during theLiang dynasty and theSui dynasty invasion of theChen dynasty, Jiankang was destroyed and rebuilt several times.[23]
Immigrants from Northern China during the middle of the Song dynasty brought asuperstratum variety, which became the source of literary readings for both Northern Wu and Jianghuai Mandarin.[24]
Jianghuai Mandarin was likely the native variety of the founding emperor of theMing dynasty,Zhu Yuanzhang, and also of many of his military and civil officials. Many southerners from below the Yangtze were relocated to Nanjing, which had been designated the capital.[25][23] Thus formed the foundation for theMandarin (simplified Chinese:官话;traditional Chinese:官話;pinyin:Guānhuà), the court dialect orkoiné, of the early Ming era.[26]
Western missionaries and KoreanHangul writings of the Ming Guanhua and theNanjing dialect provide evidence that Guanhua was a koiné and mixture of various dialects, strongly based on Jianghuai. For example, it retained the distinction between final -/n/ and -/ŋ/, which was merged early on in Jianghuai Mandarin, including in Nanjing.[27][28]
Nonetheless, some non-Nanjing characteristics can be clearly discerned in official court Mandarin.Matteo Ricci'sDicionário Português-Chinês in its description of Ming dynasty Mandarin documented a number of words that appear to be derived from Jianghuai Mandarin dialect, such as "pear, jujube, shirt, ax, hoe, joyful, to speak, to bargain, to know, to urinate, to build a house, busy, and not yet."[29] It also provides evidence for some key differences inphonology between court Mandarin and Nanjing Mandarin. For example, the court koine followed eastern and southeastern variants of Jianghuai in using rounded finals in lexemes such as全 (/tsʰyon/) and船 (/tʂʰuɔn/), whilst in the Nanjing dialect these are pronounced with unrounded vowels (in this example,/tsʰyɛn/ and/tʂʰuɛn/ respectively).[30]
In the early Ming period, Wu speakers moved into the eastern regions of Jiangsu, giving rise to theTong-Tai branch, whilst Gan speakers from Jiangxi moved into the regions further west of the Lower Yangtze, giving rise to the Huang–Xiao varieties.[31] Jianghuai speakers also moved into Hui dialect areas.[32]
Even though in 1421 the Ming dynasty moved its political and administrative capital from Nanjing toBeijing, the Jianghuai-based pronunciation centered on Nanjing retainedprestige throughout the late Ming.[33] In the late seventeenth century,Francisco Varo advised that to learn Chinese, one must acquire it from "Not just any Chinese, but only those who have the natural gift of speaking the Mandarin language well, such as those natives of the Province of Nan king, and of other provinces where the Mandarin tongue is spoken well."[34]
Jianghuai Mandarin, along with Northern Mandarin, formed the standard forBaihua before and during theQing dynasty. It was only in the mid-1800s that the northern standard based on theBeijing dialect gained dominance in its influence on the Baihua standard.[33] Baihua was used by writers all over China, regardless of the dialect spoken, thus bringing a familiarity with the written norms of Jianghuai Mandarin to readers of vernacular literature across the country. Chinese writers who spoke other dialects had to use the grammar and the vocabulary of Jianghuai and Northern Mandarin for the majority of Chinese people to understand their writing.[35]
The origin ofPeking opera is associated with the dialect, with many of the mid to late eighteenth century opera troupes entertaining the Qing court in Beijing coming from the provinces of Anhui and Hubei that spoke various dialects, including varieties of Jianghuai Mandarin.[36] Additionally,Huangmei opera, fromAnqing in Anhui Province, makes substantial use of its local dialect.[37]
Jianghuai Mandarin has been overtaking Wu as the language variety of multiple counties in Jiangsu in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An example is the former Zaicheng Town (Chinese:在城镇;pinyin:Zàichéng zhèn), inLishui County, Nanjing (Chinese:溧水;pinyin:Lìshuǐ). Both Jianghuai and Wu were spoken in several towns in Lishui, with Wu being spoken by more people in more towns than Jianghuai. Wu is called "old Zaicheng Speech", and Jianghuai dialect is called "new Zaicheng speech", with Wu being limited to a small community of elderly, speaking it to relatives. The Jianghuai dialect was present there for about a century, even though all the surrounding areas around the town are Wu-speaking. Jianghuai was always confined to the urban area itself until the 1960s, but it has now overtaken Wu.[38]
There is much conflict between and within Mandarin and Wu, which do not cluster for the 35 and 100 wordlists (figure 2). For the 35 wordlist, the Eastern Jianghuai Mandarin dialects (Yingshan, Wuhan) cluster with their geographical neighbours Xiang and Gan, but do not cluster with their putative genetic northern and southern Mandarin relatives.
Examples of such markers include阿 [a/ia/ua/ka/0a] (at, to; perfective and durative marker) in the Taixing dialect, Jianghuai Mandarin (cf. Li R. 1957),倒 [tno] (at, to; durative marker)
Diachronic evidence from Wu dialects and Jiang-Huai Mandarin dialects on the one hand and from Southeast China coastal area dialects on the other hand (all dialect material drawn from other authors) show that chain-type shifts in Chinese follow the same general rules as have been revealed by Labov for American and British English dialects, such as: 1. peripheral vowels rise: 2. non-peripheral vowels usually fall: 3. back vowels move to
Some grammatical features of Yangzhou dialect are shared with Jianghuai Mandarin . Others may be of more limited usage but are used in Dingyuan County (the setting of Qingfengzha), which belongs to the same subgroup of Jianghuai
Had Chao developed a syllabary for the Jiang-Huai Mandarin dialects with a diagnostic power and representativeness comparable to that of his Wu Syllabary, and had he placed Hangzhou in that context, he most surely would have discovered
Therefore, we might interpret the RES ts, ts', s as reflecting a phonological feature of the Southern Mandarin dialect of the Ming dynasty. This feature is also found among the modern Jiang-Huai dialects such as YC. It might also be a reflection of the dialect features of MH and AM.
to consider how it may have been influenced by possible relationships and interactions with the Jiang-Huai dialects of the Nanking area. This, in our view, should be done by first undertaking historical studies of these dialects
Words for pear, jujube, shirt, ax, hoe, jorful, to speak, to bargain, to know, to urinate, to build a house, busy, and not yet are those typical of the Chiang-Huai or Southern dialects, not the Northern Mandarin dialect.
According to Hirata, however, Hui is composed of many layers: its dialects are spoken in an area originally occupied by the Yue i* tribe, suggestive of a possible substrate, later to be overlaid by migrations from Northern China in the Medieval Nanbeichao period and the Tang and Song dynasties. This was followed by the Jiang-Huai Mandarin dialects of the migrants who arrived during the Ming and Qing periods, and more recently by Wu dialects in particular, acquired by peripatetic Hui merchants who have represented an active
Reading system definitely possesses features which are not typical of the Jiang-Huai group as a whole (Coblin Ms. 1,3)/ Careful reading of early descriptions tends to confirm this conclusion. For example, Varo's association of his Mandarin phonology with Nankingese was not absolute and unequivocal. We should recall his counsel that Guanhua be learned from "natives of the Province of Nan king, and ofother provinces where the Mandarin tongue is spoken well" [emphasis added]. We find a similar view in Morrison's accounts. On the one hand he says in his dictionary (1815:xviii), "The pronunciation in this work, is rather what the Chinese call the Nanking dialect, than the Peking.
This is true not only of writers from the Jiang-Huai and Northern Mandarin areas, but also of writers from the other dialect... Speakers of dialects other than Jiang- Huai or Northern Mandarin had to conform to the grammatical and vocabulary norms of the traditional báihuà as much as possible if they intended their writings to reach a readership across dialect barriers.
In Chinese dialectology, Lishui County is divided by the boundary between Jiang-Huai dialect and Wu dialect. In administrative distribution, eleven towns of the county lie in the Wu Dialect area and five in the Jiang-Huai Dialect area. The former includes 72.2% of the county's population; the latter 17.8% (Guo, 1995). The county seat is Zaicheng Town, also called Yongyang Town. The language varieties spoken in areas surrounding the town all belong to Wu dialect. Two varieties are spoken in the town, "the old Zaicheng Speech" and "the new Zaicheng Speech". The former is a variety of Wu Dialect, and the latter a Jiang-Huai Mandarin Dialect. The old dialect is disappearing. Its speakers, a minority of elders, use the variety only among family members. According to some interviewees over sixty years old, the new dialect has been spoken in the town area for about one hundred years. Before the 1960s, the new dialect was used only inside the town, which served as the county seat, therefore, it is called "Town Speech" or "Lishui Speech".
Works cited
Sino-Tibetan branches | |||||
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| WesternHimalayas (Himachal, Uttarakhand,Nepal,Sikkim) |
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| EasternHimalayas (Tibet,Bhutan,Arunachal) | |||||
| Myanmar and Indo- Burmese border |
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| East andSoutheast Asia |
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| Dubious (possible isolates,Arunachal) |
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